Hey SharePoint Users, You Can Now Get Busy on Google's Cloud

What will it take for Google to win business from companies that have gone all-in on Microsoft? A better Gmail/Inbox (reviews on the latter will be coming soon) or Google Docs experience doesn’t seem to be the answer.

But one good option may be to give enterprises that want to mitigate risk in the cloud an alternate platform – in this case, Google cloud -- that makes it easy to keep SharePoint document repositories and run Exchange Server mail without having to cough up additional licensing fees.

Windows on Google’s Cloud

“Google Cloud Platform is the best place to run your Windows workloads,” said Martin Buhr, a product manager.

While it’s too early to know if anyone will buy his message, or simply move their on-premise workloads to Azure, which they may be more likely to trust, he provided food for thought for productivity app users.

He cited IndependenceIT, a leading software provider of simplified IT management solutions for application and DaaS delivery, as an example of a company that’s been working to certify its Cloud Workspace Suite (CWS) with Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition running on Google Compute Engine.

“CWS is software that allows IT administrators to rapidly orchestrate and provision all elements necessary for automated, multiplatform, hypervisor/device agnostic workspaces for use with public, private or hybrid-cloud IT environments,” Buhr wrote in a blog post. He explained that the software offers a robust API set for ease of integration with existing customer business support systems, simplifying deployment while speeding time to market.

SharePoint’s Popularity

“Interestingly what many people don’t know is that the number one, most-used application on the Amazon cloud is Microsoft SharePoint,” he said, noting that this announcement is just a continuation of ubiquitous interoperable compute.

“Premise-based infrastructure went through a period where everyone raced to erase all things proprietary, and now the cloud is doing the same,” said Tompkins.

He added that what is most interesting is that, while many organizations will adopt several cloud providers and different vendors for IAAS, Microsoft continues to be the standard-bearer for business productivity apps such as messaging and collaboration.

Though neither Google nor Amazon are by any means throwing up their white flags when it comes to productivity apps, they are actively seeking to monetize other aspects of the stack “rather than betting against with Microsoft where they dominate the conversation,” said Tompkins, who said he thinks it’s a smart plan.